


about love

by iwritesometimes



Category: Star Trek: Picard
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-12
Updated: 2020-10-12
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:14:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26961976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iwritesometimes/pseuds/iwritesometimes
Summary: Excerpts from the journal of a man who has been taught (almost) everything there is to know about love.
Relationships: Elnor/Hugh | Third of Five, Elnor/OMC
Comments: 4
Kudos: 16





	about love

**Author's Note:**

> all my love and thanks to [Kennel_Boy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kennel_Boy/pseuds/Kennel_Boy) for her master beta skills and patience with my last-minute fic tangents while we're supposed to be working on other things<3

The memories are so faint and confused now, and Elnor struggles to recall his father’s face. He can’t remember his mother’s. What he knows of them now is almost entirely what he has been told, luckily by Mother Zani, a reliable source; he knows he is unique even in this, that most orphans of the terrible calamity have nothing, no history at all, no records. Only fading memories smudged every day a little further out of existence. One night, not long after they settled on Vashti, Elnor woke crying and screaming, reaching out with sweat-sticky hands for the memory of a man whose face was almost completely gone, and as she gathered him up and comforted him, whispered calming words and asked him what was the matter, Zani listened to Elnor gasp wetly that he was afraid, so afraid of losing them forever, and it was then she suggested he begin to keep a journal, so that he might always have memories for himself, as fresh as the day they happened.

He has kept a journal ever since, almost twenty years of life stored on data cards he regularly clones and hides in multiple places, one of them always on his person, so that he can never lose another memory. The very first one he ever wrote down—in the ochre Vashti daylight after that long and sleepless night—was this: his father, not reaching for him, but pushing him away, pushing him into a crowd of other children being herded onto a transport, a sea of unfamiliar bodies and faces lost to panic and confusion in his mind. He does remember staring at his father for as long as he could, until the crowd swept him back and the transport doors closed with a pneumatic hiss. From there he and all those other children were taken to another town, put on another transport, where he met Zani and Picard, where he found a home.

There are other memories before this one; he wasn’t a baby when his father put him on the last evacuation shuttle leaving their home, his ticket sewn tight to the inside of his coat. He remembers his mother in vivid impressions: cooking bright colored vegetables in a pan, leaned against her side as she explained how to stir them and when to know they were done; singing along with a song he still remembers all the words to as they all tidied up the house together, their voices harmonized and mixing; walking with her through town, their hands locked tight, as she hurried him along for some reason, chiding him for walking slowly. He has all these things written down, but his father he somehow remembers better, though it was not long he had only one and not both. She was an emergency rescue technician and died in the evacuation effort, Zani told him. Elnor remembers his father slumped against the kitchen workbench and weeping, then holding him suffocatingly tight, and weeping some more. Elnor thinks maybe after that, he tried to take special care to remember everything, and so he has so many memories of his father stored up from those last two months, mostly of his father’s fear, the terseness of his voice, the way he would hold Elnor before sending him off to bed, shaking so hard Elnor could still feel his bones rattling as he lay awake and afraid.

And he remembers the exact way his father let him go, pushed him away, knowing—as Elnor understood even then, even before he got the full story later, about limited passenger manifests and survival lotteries and horrible, impersonal statistics—that they would never see each other again, and soon he would be dead, but Elnor might live. It hadn’t been hope in his face. Only blind terror. It’s how Elnor remembers him most clearly.

***

He makes himself write down things he would otherwise rather forget; the fear of forgetting, that sort of obliteration, is stronger even than shame or embarrassment. So his journals carry ugly words and ugly thoughts, things that happened to him, things he did to other people. One day he curled, miserable and in pain, in a shadowed corner of the chapterhouse, tasting his own blood in his mouth from the vicious slap across the face one of the bigger neighborhood boys saw fit to give him that morning. His ears were still ringing when Zani found him, when she picked him up and took him into her own study, one of the very few actual private spaces in the house. She cleaned the blood from his mouth and pressed a cold pack to his face where the pain radiated in ever-strengthening waves. And she spoke to him in her calm, even voice, about how people fear what they don’t understand, about how loss and heartache and deprivation make men cruel. He remembers looking up at her, then, sharply; she’d used the word for _men_ , not the one for _people_ , and he wondered if she was making a point of it, because he was as he was, born with the body he had. She looked apologetic, corrected herself, _rhadam_ , person. Not man. Cruelty, she said, can come from anyone, and Elnor knew it to be true, because every day he had to be careful to avoid certain of his sisters and mothers, those who looked at him with the same inexplicable rage that filled the faces of some of the boys in town. Elnor was only starting to understand it, how he didn’t act as anyone expected, how people looked at him and saw what they wanted to see, or what they were afraid of seeing.

He told Zani through bleeding lips that he didn’t want to scare anyone, or make anyone hate him. He asked how he could be better, something...more acceptable. A right-thing instead of a wrong-thing. He will remember until the day he dies the way she looked at him, then, and how she pulled him into her arms with the same sort of too-tight force with which his father had held him before bed, and told him there was nothing wrong about him. That he was as right, and had as much right, as anyone else. He wasn’t to think of himself as needing to change to make himself what other people wanted to see; after all, that would be the worst sort of untruth, to lie to himself about himself, and lie to others because of it. Candor, she said, begins by being honest with yourself, by looking into your own mind and body and understanding the things you need, the things you want, the things you cannot tolerate. Only by understanding yourself can you begin to shape your life for yourself, and begin to learn what other people might need for themselves. You cannot do good for anyone else if you don’t first know what is good for you.

Elnor found that hard to believe; it could not be good for him to be _Elnor_ and continue to be hated and feared and pushed and beaten in the street and in the chapterhouse. Her eyes were very different when she shook her head and agreed, and said that that was why, beginning the next day, she would begin teaching him ways to protect himself. There was nothing wrong with setting boundaries around his own body; he didn’t need to be made to fear what they would do if he did not comply with what they wanted him to be. She would make sure, she said, that no one ever touched him again, and they would know if they tried that he would defend himself.

The sisters who had looked at him with so much hate seemed to have other places to look, after that.

***

Not everyone he met in town was so unbending toward him, however; Elnor’s journal is full of remembrances of happier meetings and warmer acquaintances, people he met as he grew amongst his sisters as one of them and learned to grow food and cook meals, to bind wounds and give comfort with words. He understood better with every passing year that what he wanted most, the way he knew to do the most good for others, was to try to keep them safe, to try to protect and provide for them. He still remembers his mother’s hands on his every time he kneads dough for a loaf of bread, remembers his father’s voice singing as he hums quietly to soothe someone in pain or trembling from a nightmare. He did these often for the other, smaller orphans on Vashti, for his sisters at home and the boys who might have been his brothers on the streets, had his life taken a different path. Zani’s training in defense soon turned to training in more deadly means of combat as he showed aptitude for it, but it was always clear what he should be doing with that training: making other people’s lives better, if he could.

On Vashti, there were always so many ways people’s lives could need improving. One night, he was walking back late from Central, with some supplies that had come in on a late transport. He probably wouldn’t have stopped to investigate the angry shout from across the street at all; at this hour, the streets belonged mostly to the belligerently drunk and those who, like him, were already perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. But the shout had been followed by a higher-pitched cry of pain that had him abandoning the hoverskip and darting from shadow to shadow between the pools of light cast by weak streetlamps, hurrying to the mouth of an alley in which he could just make out two figures, one markedly larger than the other.

He was moving before he really thought about it, all reflex from his training, from sparring with his sisters and watching them use their skills on some of the more recalcitrant gang members who sometimes threatened the chapterhouse. He carried only a wooden practice blade, more than enough to deter an assailant when used properly, but incapable of killing; by the time he realized he’d not even seen the man’s face, he was already staggering backward, cradling his now-broken hand, teeth a bared white flash in the dark. Elnor stood between him and the woman huddled against the wall; his heart raced almost as hard as he imagined hers probably did. But the man, whoever he was, hurried off out of the alley, faster than Elnor would have imagined him capable of.

Elnor turned to the woman, who shied back; it was a moment’s convincing her that she would be safe now, that she could walk with him to wherever she was going, if she wanted to. In the end, she gathered her torn tunic around herself and gladly accepted Elnor’s coat, and she said nothing at all to him as they returned to the hoverskip and walked on down the street. She motioned with nods of her head when she wanted to turn down this way or that; when they reached a brighter-lit part of town and the darkened doorway of a boarding house, she nodded to him once more, then hurried inside. Elnor waited a moment only to be sure they hadn’t been followed by that man or anyone else, and then he gathered his things and headed home, still feeling shaky with adrenaline and victory and leftover fear, but more sure in his heart than he’d ever been before that this was what he was meant to do forever.

***

 _I think I am in love,_ his journal reads, from the spring of his twentieth year. He rereads this entry quite a lot compared to most others, smiling as he does, thinking affectionately both of his younger self and of the person who inspired him to write it, someone who deserved to be loved, and who did not begrudge Elnor his eventual realization that, whether he was in love or not, he could not abandon everything he was working for, even for the chance to make it permanent.

He was a pilot. Most of the men Elnor slept with were; the local boys had all grown up with him and either didn’t think of him at all, or were unnerved by him as the strange sister-boy, too intense and wide-eyed and possibly touched in the head. People from off-world had no preconceived notions of him, and Elnor knew some of them found him nice to look at, which he was pleased by. They were all there for so short a time there wasn’t really any way for the encounters to be anything but just that—brief, furtive, usually coming to life and then dying quickly over the time it took to share some food or a drink, find an accommodating storage closet or, when they were lucky, dropship bunk, and go their separate ways. Erran, however, was part of a team sent by the Fenris Rangers to make repairs to the planetary defense grid, as well as pose some sort of request or proposal to the Vashtine governing council that Erran didn’t have details on, and Zani wouldn’t divulge when Elnor asked. He was there for weeks, and so Elnor got to see him almost every time he went to Central, at first seemingly just by accident, running into him at the cantina or the drink stand, spotting him from across the square when Elnor came to buy supplies, seeing him working on his ship when Elnor met a visiting sister at the spaceport. Soon he began to realize that these meetings were not so much down to chance as to Erran intentionally manufacturing them to see him more often, which Elnor found out by simply asking him point-blank after the second such meeting on the same day.

Erran laughed, deep and resonant in his big furry barrel chest; his Fenrir smile was all sharp white teeth beneath glittering grey lupine eyes, and Elnor found himself smiling back, helplessly, his heart racing when Erran told him he was right, that he was too smart to miss a trick. That Erran wanted to see more of him, if that was alright.

He was a very easy person to love. He was full of stories of the places he’d traveled and people he’d met, all wildly unfamiliar and fascinating to the mind of a young man who’d only been on one other world he could barely recall, and would probably never leave Vashti. He answered Elnor’s endless questions with amused patience or excited warmth, never judging his ignorance or his bottomless hunger to know more, to know _everything_. Elnor had never known someone so willing to tell him things or listen to what he had to say, who indeed seemed _interested_ in the things Elnor told him, about Vashti, about the Qowat Milat, about gardening or cooking or braiding his hair. And Erran was always very kind to him, always careful to touch him gently until he knew Elnor wanted something else; he touched him more than any other man ever had—casual things, a cuff to his shoulder or leather-padded fingers through his hair, strong, massive arms around him in which Elnor sometimes felt he could completely disappear, and thought maybe he wanted that. Other people had _wanted_ him before, and it was always nice to be wanted, but Elnor had rarely felt quite so safe with any of them, or quite so much like he could belong, and stay.

Erran asked him to stay. To come with him when he left, come back to Fenris and join the Rangers. Elnor had never wanted so badly to leave Vashti as he did in the moment Erran asked him, partly because he knew already that he wouldn’t. He was so close to being done with his training at the chapterhouse; Zani had just gotten approval from her superiors to let him complete the course of study and try to earn his _tan qalanq_ : everything he’d been working for since he was just a child. Erran had told him so many wonderful stories about the Rangers, about the good they did in the quadrant, about the worlds the Fenrir brought under their protection, like welcoming orphan children into a warm and loving family. It was exactly the kind of difference Elnor longed to make...but he couldn’t just turn his back on the family he had here to run off with his handsome pilot and sail around the stars. Much as part of him felt like it was desperately clawing its way out to do.

He cried when he told Erran he could not go, and Erran held him, gentle with him even then, even when Elnor had hurt and disappointed him. They spent the last two days Erran was on Vashti locked in his little berth on his ship, wringing every second’s worth of pleasure from the time they had. Elnor could not make him any promises, and Erran didn’t ask for any. But he said that if, when his training was complete, and Mother Zani was pleased that he had learned everything she had to teach him, and he felt like he could do more good elsewhere than he could by staying on Vashti, Erran still thought there was a place for him on Fenris, he would consider going. It was the best he could offer, and felt like nothing at all, but it was the most truthful thing he could say.

His journal entries after Erran left are short and mechanical, bulleted lists of the day’s high points and low points, for several months on end. They recover their eloquence eventually, as Elnor recovered his spirit and his appetite, and redoubled his efforts in training. And he doesn’t regret any moment of the time, even having to say goodbye, because he knows that without it, he would not have had such a bright candle to hold against the darkness of what came after, or proof that he was capable of a feeling so bright and certain and pure.

***

The scream echoed through the chapterhouse. Elnor dreams of it still, sometimes: the desolation, the empty rage. He’d never heard a sound like that from anyone, and he hasn’t since. It woke him from a dead sleep, him and a dozen of his younger sisters all curled on their pallets in the floor of the open hall; he staggered up, shushing them quietly and telling them he would go investigate. Disoriented in the scant light of a few lanterns high on the walls, he picked his way to the back of the house and hid in the shadow of the portico where the knot of dark-robed women in the courtyard wouldn’t see him. They encircled one of their own, doubled over in pain and wailing, completely deaf to the gentling, hushing voices of her sisters trying to comfort her. Every sound that came out of her raked through Elnor’s chest, her pain so obvious and overwhelming it almost hurt just to hear. But Elnor had no idea why, until finally, eventually, she exhausted herself with crying and let the others half-carry her to a bench, and he caught a glimpse of her face in the firelight. He knew her very well; she was only a little older than him, had trained with him the entire time he’d lived in the chapterhouse, and been one of the kinder of his sisters to the little orphan boy who didn’t really belong here. She’d been gone from the house for only a few months; she’d sworn herself as _qalankhkai_ last year, and Elnor still remembered how happy she had been, smiling and fierce-eyed with fresh dark ink drawn around her lips and eyes in decorative whorls, holding the hand of a stunning man with dark eyes, her _rrhadam_ , the person she was sworn to. The way they’d looked at each other, Elnor had known it wasn’t just an oath that kept them together. He didn’t see that man here with his sister, now, and his heart sank into the ground.

A hand on his elbow startled him; one of his younger sisters, as sleepy-eyed as he imagined himself to be, tugging him back inside, into a secluded corner to whisper what she’d overheard the night watchguards talking about: that Sister Kariah’s _rrhadam_ was dead, that she had nearly died herself, and might still succumb to her wounds. That it had been the Tal Shiar, an ambush, that four other Qowat Milat had died in the attack, somewhere halfway around the planet at an outpost that should have been a secret. They should have been safe, believed themselves to be safe, and then the oath-holder was dead and his _qalankhkai_ had not been able to stop it happening.

The whispers caught and raced like wildfire; by morning everyone knew, and by the next afternoon, Sister Kariah had lain down her head and died. The timbre of the whispers changed, sadder, angrier. And some that were sure it had been the only proper end. A Qowat Milat alive while her oath-holder was dead? It would have been a shame too great for any of them to bear.

But late in the day, Elnor found some of the other girls his age, girls who had known Kariah better than he had, huddled together and crying in the sickroom at the back of the house. They looked up at him, eyes wet and haunted, and must have seen the same look in him, because they opened their arms to him, let him mourn with them, knowing that they were perhaps just as shameful for crying not because Kariah had failed, but because she had lost something unimaginably precious, something she had not been able to live without.

***

“Are you almost finished for the night?”

Elnor looks up from his journal at Hugh’s voice, a little startled; Hugh can be very quiet when he wants to be, and sometimes without meaning to be. He’s used to trying not to be noticed when he walks into a room, though usually Elnor homes in on his presence the moment he does. He must have been deeper in thought tonight than he realized. He smiles up at Hugh from the little desk in the corner of their quarters, where he’s been dutifully writing out the day’s memories in his journal, chewing absently at the end of his stylus.

“Almost,” he confirms, and leans into Hugh’s hand on his shoulder. It slides easily to the nape of his neck, fingertips brushing aside his long, loose hair to knead small circles at the top of his spine. “Just a last couple of things I don’t want to forget.”

“Anything I should know about?” Hugh asks, smile audible in his voice. Elnor scribbles out another sentence, taps the _save_ icon, his own grin sprawling wider.

“I saw a particularly beautiful tree this afternoon,” he teases, powering down his PADD and tucking it away among Hugh’s PADDs and books and documents, a place made for it especially. He stands, Hugh’s hand slipping down his arm, and settles his own at Hugh’s hips, leans against the edge of the desk and draws him in. “Tried a new tea I liked for lunch. I finished training the new security staff. And this morning I woke up next to you.”

“Same as you have for the past several hundred,” Hugh says, an eyebrow tilted up as if to say, _Where are you going with this?_ But the smile hanging around his mouth is warm and relaxed and only for Elnor, only seen here, when they are alone and the building around them is quiet, and their friends and colleagues, all the lives that are precious to them in the Borg Reclamation Project, are safe for the night.

“I haven’t tired of it yet,” Elnor assures him, his fingers creeping just up under the hem of Hugh’s soft t-shirt. He’s already ready for bed; it’s rare that he’s in his sleep clothes before Elnor’s in his. The novelty alone is enough to make Elnor smile, bend his head to kiss Hugh’s cheek, lingering close. The warmth he radiates seems to seep into Elnor’s skin and bones, reminder of Hugh’s life and vitality and safety, the things Elnor treasures most in his life, perhaps because he came so close to losing them. “I do not think that I ever will.”

“Hm. I hope not,” Hugh admits, with a look that seems more open and unsure than usual. Elnor squeezes at his hips and brushes their noses together, foreheads touching, sharing breath. “I don’t want to find out what the end of you loving me feels like.”

Elnor makes a soft sound and kisses him, helpless to do anything else; kisses him a little harder, a little more intensely than he means to. It’s just that he wants to make certain Hugh _knows_. “That doesn’t exist,” he whispers when he eventually lets the kiss break. “There is no end. I have learned more about love from you than I thought there was left to know. And I never want to stop learning.”

Hugh’s smile is radiant, nearly squints his eyes shut; he tangles a hand in Elnor’s hair and curls the other around his wrist, holding tight. “So don’t stop,” he murmurs, and Elnor has learned Hugh well enough to know it’s encouragement and admonishment and permission and hope, all at once.

Don’t stop, Hugh says. So Elnor doesn’t.


End file.
